6 BEST Pieces Of Business Advice That Made Me Millions | E103

... quick one. The Diary of a CEO Live, my live show, my live reincarnation of this podcast, is coming on tour, and it's coming to a city near you. There's a link in the description below. Put your email address in, and I will email you when tickets go on sale. Can't wait to see you. (upbeat music playing) I get so many questions from all of you guys in my DMs, in the comments section on YouTube, everywhere, so I wanna try something new. I'm gonna start answering some of those questions that I've historically answered privately in public, so more of you can gain access to those answers. I asked everybody in my Telegram community to submit videos of questions that they want answered from me, and in this video today, I'm gonna answer those questions with total, total honesty. And these questions range across business, to personal questions, to questions about relationships and mental health and challenges that you're facing. So here is the first question you asked me this week.

My name's Daniella. I'm 18, and I'm about to enter my first year at uni to study economics. I have a lot of commitments. I am running a business with my business partner, I'm making music, I'm learning languages, and I'm playing sports. And I worry that my focus is split. How do you suggest that I move forward? Do you think I should grit my teeth and balance everything to the best of my ability, or do you think I should prioritize and sacrifice for better quality output, despite loving every single thing? I'm looking forward to your response. Thank you so much for listening.

I think the single biggest lesson that I learned when I was starting off early in my business career was the importance of focus. And I had this drummed into me by one of my investors one day when I came to them and presented this new idea, which was in addition to the current company that I was building. And they hit me really hard with this, like, verbal whip and told me, they said, "Steve, focus is everything." And that stayed with me. I was annoyed at the time, because naturally when you're a creative person and a very inspired person, as many of us are, you have so many ideas. And the problem is, you can't take on all of those ideas at once. And any attempt to do so compromises each individual idea. So if you have three ideas and you're, you're giving them 33% of your time each, the chance of mastery or success in any of those things is drastically, drastically re- reduced. And especially when it comes to business. If you're giving anything less than 100% of your focus to your business, you, you can rest assured that there are very competent, probably better-funded competitors out there that are giving 100%. Focus and your time is the only currency that you have. So making the decision to invest only a part of your time and focus into what you're doing is a decision to reduce the chance of a really successful outcome. And here's another thing. So I don't know how solid this is as advice, but honestly when you're young and you're broke and you're bootstrapping, focus matters even more. So for me, what I would do, and, and when I think about the, the 50 years of my career, is at the very, very start I'd go very, very, very narrow, and I'd try and succeed in something that will be the gateway, if it is successful, to me being able to build my resources, my financial resources, my team, so that I can focus on multiple things. And that's really the trajectory I've taken in my life. I, at 18 years old, focused on one thing, one business idea, and really nothing else. And when I say nothing else, I also mean a lot of personal things were sacrificed. I, I focused on that for the, for about seven years in total. That business became a success. I now have resources to allocate against multiple things that I want to do, which frees up more time so I can start companies now and not even be the CEO of these businesses. But when you're, when you're starting out in, in life and your career, that's not a luxury you have. So my advice for young people would be to do everything in your power to focus. In business what we do is we operate in sprints, which means when you have an idea, you assemble a team around it, and you focus them for a dedicated and predetermined period of time, say three months or six months, only on that idea to give it its best possible chance of success. And after those six months, you assess it, and you make very brutal, very honest, very ego-free decisions whether to continue or not. That's how I like to think about focus and projects and how to make the decisions around allocating your time. What you really should do if you wanna give an idea its best possible chance of success, if you wanna give DJing your best possible chance of success, or writing that book, or becoming a content creator, is you should look at the task and dedicate the next six months to doing that and only that. If you allocate time to other things in that period, you're reducing the chance of a positive outcome for that one thing. And I, I tend to see as well, especially young entrepreneurs, when they have multiple businesses and multiple things they're pursuing and multiple things they're trying to master at the same time, as the phrase goes, they become the master of none, which means they kind of stumble through life never really achieving any real substantive success, because they've spent all of their life trying things in a half-assed, timid way. If you want to be successful, if you want to get mastery in anything that matters to you, here's where discipline really, really matters. You have to install into your mind something I call the someday shelf, which is inspiration comes to you. You have a new idea when you're walking down the street or in the shower. You think, "That's brilliant. That will be a multi-gazillion dollar idea." We all do it. If you want to be successful, don't then add it into your successful idea. Don't then try and contend with two different ideas and give 50% to each. Put it on the someday shelf and see if it nags you. The great ideas will sit there on that someday shelf and they will nag you. And if it nags you for long enough, six months, for a year, then maybe it's time to take action. But my mind has a someday shelf on it that has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things on it. And if something sits there for more than a year, more than six month, and it's still screaming at me, and it doesn't dissolve away and collect dust on the someday shelf and disappear into the back, then I pull it forward and I put a plan in place to give it the sprint it deserves, to resource that idea and give it its best possible chance of success.